North Slope of Alaska in the Cretaceous Period from Curiosity Stream's Amazing Dinoworld

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North Slope of Alaska in the Cretacous Period

My wife got me Curiosity Stream for Christmas.  This is a great streaming service of documentary films.  I found their new documentary called Amazing Dinoworld.  It really is amazing.  I learned about these dinosaurs so I drew them and now you will learn about them and of course you can print the coloring pages to color.  By the way, there are a lot of documentaries on Curiosity Stream that are dinosaur related so I have a new source of dinosaurs etc. to draw and write about.  

Curiosity Stream's Amazing Dinoworld

Deinocheirus was a species of polar dinosaur.  They lived in polar regions.  They were found in what is now Northern Alaska's North Slope.  It was a very uniquie bird-like Ornithomimosaur dinosaur because it looked a bit like a duckbilled dinosaur.  Duckbills are also called Hadrosaurs.  Ornithmimosaurs were mostly fast running medium sized Theropod dinosaurs that looked like an ostritch.   But this new find was very different.  Deinocheirus' arms were found first.  The paleontologists thought that it was a huge predator because they were huge arms with three huge claws on each hand.  Then the rest of the fossilized skeleton was found.  It turned out that this was a big, heavily built herbivore...or so they thought.  

Unlike Hadrosaurs, it had no teeth.  The paleontologists also found fish scales in the mouth or digestive track area and realized that Deinocheirus was a pescivore because it ate fish.  In the drawing Deinocheirus is heading to a pond to fish.  Below is a photo of gastroliths that I own.  These were found in the ribcage of a long necked Sauropod from Central Utah.  Sauropods also swallowed stones to grind up their food, which was probably ferns, pine needles, and cycads, mostly.  Gastroliths have a weird oily feel about them because they were polished by the grinding in the stomach and the stomach acid worked on them too.  

Gastroliths

Another feature in Deinocheirus is that the stomach area had gastroliths as.  Gastroliths are stones an animal diliberately swallows to help grind up their food.  They swallow the rocks to graind up their tough leafy onr needle-like plant food.   This indicates that  Deinocheirus was an omnivore... the first known omniverous dinosaur.  Omnivores eat both meat and plants.  And technically fish are meat.  

Deinocheirus descended from predatory Theropod dinosaurs, but evolved until it lost its teeth, and became an eater of both plants and fish.  The documentary, Amazing Dinoworld, shows it using its 8-9 foot (about 3 meters) arms to swipe the water and kill fish by whacking them onto the land.  Those arms were also useful in defense since they were long and powerful and tipped with large claws. 

Deinocheirus was bigger than any other known Orithomimosuur at around 36 feet or 11 meters long.  It weighed around 7 tons.  It had the longest arms of any bipedal dinosaur.  Bipedal means walking on two legs.  Deinocheirus was covered in feathers.  This is the not the first evidence that at least some Theropods  had feathers.  Maybe all Theropods didn't have feathers, but maybe they did.  In fact, it seems farily certain that having feathers in the Arctic (which was cold even in the Cretaceous) would be an advantage. 

Eggs were found from another large feathered dinosaur (Gigantoraptor) in Mongolia that were in a large ring.  This would have allowed large feathered dinosaurs to brood their eggs.  The mother or father dinosaur could sit their enormous frame in the center and cover the eggs with their arms.  And then they could rotate every few minutes to cover a different set of eggs.  Some modern large birds lay their eggs in a ring too.  Of course Deinocheirus was probably not an ancester of birds.  The ancestors of birds were probably the smaller feathered Theropod dinosaurs.  

The other dinosaur in the drawing is Protoceratops.  A Protoceratops was recently found with downy proto-feather or maybe even fur markings.  They also found a fossilized skeleton of Protoceratops that had apparently died when its burrow collapsed on it.  This is big news.  Dinosaurs were digging and living in dens... at least some of them were!  Protoceratops was one of, if not THE earliest Ceratoposian.  It looked like a mini Triceratops that forgot to grow any horns. If Protoceratops had fur or proto-feathers and could dig burrows then maybe it could have lived in the Arctic.  They showed the species there in the documentary.   I do not know if placing Protoceratops in ancient Alaska's North Slope is accurate or not.  Evidence of a non-Theropod having any kind of covering other than scales is a very new discovery.  It may indicate that many dinosaurs had feathers.

The other Ceratopsian dinosaur in the distance is a new speices of Pachyrhinosaurus.  Untlike other members of the Genera, this new species had horns and apparantly fur or downy proto-feathers.  

There were some members of this species in what is now the Alaskan North Slope.  

New species of Horned Pachyrhinosaurus

Another dinosaur from Amazing Dinoworld is Nanuqsaurus.  It was an Arctic Tyrannosaur with fur-like protofeathers covering its body.  At about 20 feet long it was about one half the size of Tyrannosaurus rex.  It had thick protofeathers that quite likely were white for camoflauge.  Its name is part Eskimo.  Nanuq means polar bear.  Saurus means lizard in Latin.  So the apex predator in what is now North Slope Alaska was Nanuqsaurus.  Its full name is:  Nanuqsaurus hoglundi.  The species name is to honor Forest Hoglund, a philanthropist in Texas.  His family foundation has donated over $55 million to social causes.  I think that it is great that many wealthy people and even families give so much to better other people's lives.  So I like the species name for that reason.  Below is Nanuqsaurus hoglundi, the Arctic Tyrannosaur.  

Nanuqsaurus the Polar Bear Lizard

NOTE:  The images in the sky are the Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis.  This light display of Nature is also called the Northern Lights.  I saw them when I taught school in Juneau, Alaska and when my wife and I went to Iceland.  I am posting a photo or two that  I took of a cool display that looked like a giant green spiral galaxy.  These three new coloring page drawings will be found in printable 
form by clicking on the top button labeled either . . . .All Printables. . . . or . . . . Paleontology.   
Scroll down to the bottom of the list in the drop down menu for 
new drawings like the drawings on this blog entry page.  

Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights in Iceland November 2017

Nortern Lights over Iceland
(My wife and I are in the middle of this photo.)
That is the big dipper in the Northern Lights.